Description: Beginning with B. F. Skinner and the legend of a child raised in a box, Lauren Slater takes us from a deep empathy with Stanley Milgram's obedience subjects to a funny and disturbing re-creation of an experiment questioning the validity of psychiatric diagnosis. Previously described only in academic journals and textbooks, these often daring experiments have never before been narrated as stories, chock-full of plot, wit, personality, and theme.
Brief description: Lauren Slater is the author of The $60,000 Dog: My Life with Animals and Playing House: Notes of a Reluctant Mother. A psychologist and writer, Lauren is the author of five books of nonfiction: Welcome to My Country, Prozac Diary, Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir, Love Works Like This, and Opening Skinner's Box, as well as a collection of short stories, Blue Beyond Blue. She has received numerous awards, including a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts award, multiple inclusions in Best American volumes, and a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Review Quotes: As much urgent reassessment as historical re-creation . . . one of the most informative and readable recent books on psychology.-- "Publishers Weekly Starred Review"